Ten Things To Consider When Moving House

1) Don’t move, ever. If you hear the words conveyancing or mortgage then set fire to your pants, poke yourself in the eye or remove hair using pliers, under no circumstances consider moving unless you wish to endure week upon week of relentless pain.

2) Should you find yourself in the unfortunate position of moving then you require a removals company. These range from a small white van man with a dog called Colin (Colin refuses to lift heavy objects) to multinational companies that expect you to pack everything in square boxes so all they do is left for a few grand. We however choose a delightful option, mid range lorries with a rugby team (optional shared shower at the end)

3) Prepare to change address, most companies will provide facilities to do this whilst others will charge you for the privilege of daring to ask to change it. Expect to be charged anywhere up to £37.62 as we were which is a bit steep when you do it yourself on the Internet and some trainee the other end puts a stamp on an envelope to confirm. Unless of course you are changing address from Mansfield and you need to let a Mansfield company know, in that case you have to hand write a letter and post it recorded, they will then stamp it, make a duplicate, countersign it and write you a reply. None of the ‘pop in and we will sort it for you’ malarkey, you do it our way or no way.

4) Change of landline number. Be prepared to smash you head against the wall for several weeks as you wrestle with phone companies on the availability of the single engineer to come along and flip a switch for you. Apparently it takes a month, even though the phone line is installed, live with a dialling tone and is used by telemarketing companies to phone us at 2am in the morning to sell us PPI claims.

5) Moving day can be stressful, even more so when the chain you are in all get random bits of information that fails to match. It’s awfully confusing when one completes and the other fail to get the same message, very soon a joyous day turns into a shambles as you fight over the keys.

6) The weather. Choose a fine day, not the absolutely miserable mother of a day they we ended up with that gave us 24 hours of non stop drizzle and around two tonnes of mud to swish around the house.

7) When buying a house consider a few things we had to take into account, first we are on a flood plane, secondly we are within range of a military shelling area, thirdly we are within range of a gas terminal that we have to register with in case it suddenly blows and they just find our teeth and last but not least check if you are within five metres of one of the last remaining 200 year old Elm trees in England and check that the seven directional tilt on the house is in fact quirky and not critical.

8) When viewing houses avoid places that bottle brown water and ask you to sample it, it’s recycled urine as we found out when the tea tasted funny (seriously, it was wee)

9) Again, don’t be misled, a swimming pool advertised that the owners bathed naked in and drank champagne actually turned out to be a children’s inflatable paddling pool upon inspection.